Location: Preferred Bridgewater, NJ or Cary, NC
Virtual will be considered
The Product Owner (PO) for Forms is responsible for evaluating proposed correspondence changes for prioritization, impact, appropriateness, and validity. You oversee an inventory of over 3,000 Group Benefits forms and the associated applications that leverage the forms. You review processes within the Employee Digital ART and offer proposals to alternative options which may help streamline processes. You prioritize a backlog of items that will improve the customer experience and internal form retrieval process. You oversee the Employee Digital segment of proposed configurations for new and migrating customers to ensure any potential conflicts are avoided. You use metrics and the Kanban method to manage the flow of work.
You negotiate with other Product Owners regarding the priorities of site updates with shared development team.
This is a critical role with significant accountability to build and manage relationships and responsibilities across the team of agile teams and within your team. POs work closely with the Scrum Master, team members, Product Management, Customers, Business Owners, and other stakeholders to create viable and sustainable plans. They constantly seek feedback from multiple stakeholders incorporating the feedback into their plans.
Key Responsibilities
The Work:
- Conducts complex research and analysis to quantify business opportunities and issues and develops formal recommendations for presentation to management
- Designs, implements, and monitors the progress of initiatives, and milestones to ensure timeliness and deliverables are met
- Maintains detailed business inventories with metadata and leads projects to evaluate and consolidate service communications
- Oversees staff and manage projects to implement new and/or modified processes, procedures, and/or initiatives
- Identifies training needs of end users and staff and develops and provides the necessary training to meet those needs
- Partners with other operational areas to build strong working relations and improve workflow and organizational issues
- Manages critical relationships with IT, consultants and vendors, internal end users, and business customers/leadership
- Provides updates to senior business leadership regarding project status and the application and implementation of new or revised procedures, processes, and/or initiatives
- Full people management responsibility, including hiring, firing, promotions, performance and compensation management, training & development
The Interactions:
1. Collaborate with the team to create viable and sustainable plans
2. Manage stakeholders’ expectations through iterative demonstrations of completed work
3. Hold the team accountable for what has been defined as set criteria, receiving, and incorporating feedback from multiple sources
4. Active interaction with Product Management and other partners to protect the integrity of the deliverables
A Product Owner is:
- The voice of the customer and business needs at the team level
- A leader that prioritizes, defines, and shapes the work for the agile team
- Approver of work delivered (accepts as complete and usable at team level)
- A person able to translate business needs into technology solutions
- A person who ensures we are delivering business value through tracking of metrics and outcomes
A Product Owner’s focus on value is evident when we see them…
- Building deep insight into our customers’ needs, to support sound judgments about the utility of our solutions.
- Engaging our delivery teams in active exploration of solution options, and evaluation of trade-offs.
- Regularly re-examining our priorities to optimize the team’s alignment with stakeholder and business demands.
A Product Owner’s fixation on clarity is evident when they:
- Seek first to understand – our customers, stakeholders, and team members – and then to be understood.
- Make all the team’s work visible, through progress updates, metrics and transparent processes.
- Fully convey the context, requirements and constraints that shape the team’s delivery.
- Create accurate, unambiguous acceptance criteria to minimize the risk of misunderstandings about the work to be delivered.
A Product Owner continuously employs agile practices that will sustain flow when they:
- Maintain a backlog of well-refined work items for the team.
- Continuously identify dependencies that may impede the team’s work, and proactively seek ways to resolve them.
- Respect the team’s need for focus by leveraging regularly scheduled, time-boxed meetings and minimizing ad-hoc demands.
- Collaborating with Scrum Masters, development managers and other stakeholders to reinforce the team’s control of their work.
A Product Owner champions Lean and reduces waste when they:
- Simplify our stories, requirements, and solutions, to maximize the amount of work not done!
- Educate themselves, the team, and others on how to recognize waste.
- Make continuous improvement a foundation of all our processes.
- Recognize that time is our most precious resource, and they protect it vigorously.
A Product Owner’s leads by example when they:
- Act as a facilitator to help the team solve the conflicts that hold them back from progressing.
- Act as a Mentor, building trust and letting the team know you are available for them. Whenever they need advice or guidance, you can assist them.
- Act as a Negotiator to help analyze the advantages and disadvantages of each possibility and evaluate which trade-offs to make.
- Interprets the situation and can understand the atmosphere, and knows when something needs to change.
- Exemplifies and models the desired behaviors in their daily interactions with the team
- Celebrates wins with the team and fosters ways to let the team members demo their work proudly to leadership audiences.
- Helps the team members grow in their knowledge
Key Behaviors
- Able to take all forms of input and synthesize (not influenced by “hierarchy”) – Seek Diverse Perspectives
- Willing to observe, analyze, and make recommendations - Seek Diverse Perspectives
- Communicate factually. Navigate conversations to align on a set of data inputs that drive identification and prioritization of work.
- Take ownership, influence at all levels, access all stakeholders equally (don’t ask for permission) – Seize Opportunity
- Maintain stability throughout the iterations and add appropriate feedback as needed – Enable Solutions
- Understand that they don’t have to be the technical expert but can work with the team members to understand and prioritize technical stories – Enable Solutions
- Able to identify, access and connect among key stakeholders and experts - Seek Diverse Perspectives
- Know how to get things done through others, and provide the clarity needed to accomplish it – Deliver what matters
- Driven and motivated by our customers and the business to focus on the right outcomes – Deliver Results
- Able to make decisions on information that is available at that time. Be comfortable with progressive elaboration and discovery (Progress over perfection) – Manages Ambiguity
- While some POs may have direct reports, Product Owners are leaders not managers. POs do not direct the team but see themselves as a member of the team and are able to adapt their leadership approach to enable and empower the team to solve problems and deliver outcomes – Empowerment & Collaboration
